Today’s word is “Biopower” (also sometimes referred to as bio-techno-power), first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how a state controls its citizens, not through negative means (such as the threat of death or physical coercion), but through more positive means such as by promoting a better life, namely by emphasising the protection of life. As the word implies with “bio”, it has a specific biological aspect to it.

According to Foucault, biopower is how capitalist and democratic societies controlled their citizens, and it was “an indispensible element” for the “development of capitalism” because it helped adjust “the phenomena of population to economic processes”.

Biopower was able to do this because those wielding it used it to control and define a population’s individuality and sexuality to fit into the “machinery of production”. It worked because power defined things as a “binary system”, where everything was black and white. An example of this was sex, where it was in the binary world of “licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden”.

Biopower itself had two parts to it, or poles: the first was a scientific aspect of categorizing humans e.g. race, gender, sex etc. What this did was class individuals and objectify them, and if individuals accepted these definitions and categories they helped define who they were. The institutions that helped create these categories were places like prisons, schools, or hospitals.

The second aspect was disciplinary power, and what this referred to was internal surveillance. In other words, the individual policed him or herself, producing a docile subject. A key part to this was the idea of confession, the belief that if you told the truth about something like your sexuality or your deep, inner feelings to a more powerful figure than you, such as a priest or psychiatrist, that it would in turn set you free.

Interestingly, many of these ideas have been covered as part of documentary film maker Adam Curtis’s new series “The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom”, specifically around the ideas developed out of game theory that helped to class humans as cold, calculating, rational beings that only ever looked out for their own self-interest.

There is an excellent segment in the first part of the program which covers how psychiatrists defined objective measurements (check lists) of mental disorders that could be analysed by computers. As the documentary revealed, the amazing thing was that patients began to diagnose themselves according to the check lists, and started to request doctors and psychoanalysts to “cure” them and make them more normal as defined by these objective measurements.

Interestingly, the program shows that these objective lists could have described symptoms that were just part of every day life and had nothing to do with a mental disorder at all. (The second part of the series can be found here).

Recently, sociologist Jackie Orr coined a related term to Foucault’s biopower called “psychopower”. While biopower was meant to focus mainly on a biological element, Orr uses the idea of psychopower to refer to the management and control of an individual’s (or the population’s) psychology by using stimulation, normalisation and discipline. Her analysis looks at the Cold War and how the American population was normalised to be afraid of the Soviets through these means in order to achieve what she calls the “militarization of internal space”. For more on Orr’s views, there is an excellent podcast available at ABC’s All In The Mind, or you can read her book “Panic Diaries” (there is a review here).

For more reading on biopower and Foucault (in addition to the links in the article above):
Dictionary for the study of the works of Michel Foucault
Wisegeek
Theory.org.uk
Foucault and Neoliberalism by James D. Marshall
Foucault.info